Page 18. Ben is speaking:

… We go where she pointed, and when we break out of the trees, we’re where I’d been heading for.

Kind of. 

So. There’s this place on the kipuka, one people have used ever since there’ve been people here. The sandstone rises into a little mesa, and on the southwest side of that the prevailing winds have carved a rock shelter. That’s like a shallow cave, deep and dry, with a sloping roof so smoked with millennia of soot you can barely make out the petroglyphs: deer and mountain sheep, spirals and hands and stars. In late afternoon, the sun shines in and warms the back wall. Now, in the pale moonlight, that warmth is radiating back like the stone is alive.

I’d had this thought, about the only rational one since I saw Trace stumping down the road, that I could take her to the rock shelter. With food and water she’d be more or less okay, I’d know where she was and could bring her supplies until I could, I don’t know, talk her down, or anyway figure out what to do so as not to end up with a corpse. Rowan has already laid his belly on the warm sand of the shelter floor. I dump my pack, roll my shoulders, and look around.

We aren’t where I thought.

Okay, it’s a southwest-facing rock shelter. In front of it, there’s a sandstone ledge. Since Mad got sick, I’ve sat there a lot, looking out over the ponderosa and trying to think, or to not think.

But this ledge is only kind of like the one I know. 

It’s narrower. And the shelter I know is in the middle of the kipuka, while this one’s on the southwest edge, right over the lava field—if you sat on this ledge your feet would dangle over the flow.

I’ve hiked all over the kipuka. I know where everything is. I don’t know where this is. 

Trace lowers her pack. Gives me a wary look.

I don’t say anything. I mean you don’t do this survivalist, into-the- wilderness thing, get where you thought you were going, and have to tell the girl you’re lost. I’m looking around, looking around. There’s only one kipuka. There’s only one smoked-up rock shelter.

Trace says, “Could I borrow your flashlight?”

I can’t orienteer my way off a soda cracker. I nod casually and dig the headlamp out of the pack. She kneels, grubs in her own.

I’m sorry, but in the wilderness bluffs don’t work. You just die. I kiss off my testosterone and say, like ain’t-this-funny, “So much for cruising around in the dark. I don’t have a clue where we are.”

“We’re in the cave.” She sits back. In her bandaged hands is a book. 

… Continued, p. 20